"Discovering Yiddish song was like dreaming about the attic of my childhood home and then waking up to find an actual trunk, filled with old photographs, letters, and documents. Yiddish song populates the past with ancestors whose modal melodies and quirky eloquence resound in unexpected marvels — a lullaby for grownups, a love song that compares the beloved to a tasty bowl of borsht, a tune that a grandfather has slyly hidden in a wineglass. Such songs — variously solemn and whimsical, wise and antic, tender and exuberant — illuminate musical traditions not only in the Old World but in the New Worlds of the American songbook and Argentine tango.